“Doctor Who is pretty dark, I think. Generally it’s dark, it’s always been dark. Even in the more modern ones. If you look at the Tom Baker stuff, it’s especially dark. When he leaves Leela — who’s a very beloved assistant — he just laughs after it. There’s none of the [breaking down and crying]. He just laughs, and “on to the next one,” you know. It’s a bonkers show. It’s a monster. To have a unity that runs eight years [of the new series]… it’s pretty crazy. They’ve done everything, they’ve tried all sorts of stuff. It seems to me the episodes that we’re doing now seem more like classic Who. We’re going back to that style. But you’ll have to wait and see.”

When asked about Peter Capaldi as The Doctor he said:

“With someone like Capaldi, he’s a massive Who fan. He knows Who inside out. And everything he does is very, carefully planned and thought about. I remember when they first started talking to me about doing it, and I was very nervous for just those reasons. How do you shape this performance? But then when I heard who was going to do it — when they told me it was Capaldi, [I thought] that’s not really a problem. He’s so good. I was relieved, pretty much. It would have been a very different situation if it had been another kind of Matt Smith character. A guy who you don’t know. Molded from the start. But with Capaldi, you look at his career and you look at his performances they are all so brilliant, and all so different as well. It was a lucky break for me, I think that.”

Wheatly elaborated on how he got the job directing the first two episodes saying:

“It was something I sought out. I got my agent to kind of badger them about doing, because I was a fan as a kid. But also because my kid was a fan of the show and I wanted to make something that he could see, for a change. That was it. And it’s been very geeky indeed. Going into the TARDIS, I held the Sonic Screwdriver the other day, and that was a particular thrill. All sorts of stuff. Also stuff I can’t talk about, that’s been very, very exciting for me.”

Full Picture Here – The BBC has just released the first image of Peter Capaldi in his costume as the Doctor. So what do you think?

Press release:

The Doctor has a new look as Peter Capaldi’s era officially begins. In a picture released today by the BBC, Capaldi can be seen in the costume that will define his time as the Twelfth Time Lord in one of TV’s biggest roles. Sporting a dark blue Crombie coat with red lining, dark blue trousers, a white shirt as well as black Dr. Marten shoes, the look was created by Doctor Who costume designer Howard Burden.

Commenting on his costume, Peter Capaldi said: “He’s woven the future from the cloth of the past. Simple, stark, and back to basics. No frills, no scarf, no messing, just 100 per cent Rebel Time Lord.” While lead writer and executive producer Steven Moffat added: “New Doctor, new era, and of course new clothes. Monsters of the universe, the vacation is over – Capaldi is suited and booted and coming to get you!”

Filming for episode one of series 8 began earlier this month, after 10.2 million tuned-in on Christmas Day to get their first much-anticipated glimpse of Capaldi’s Doctor. Charlotte Moore, Controller of BBC One, commented: “Peter Capaldi’s Doctor is officially recorded in history today with the unveiling of his new costume. It’s sharp, smart and stylish – The Twelfth Time Lord means business.”

Ever since the legendary Tom Baker walked on screen in The Day of the Doctor fans have been speculating as to who this person might be. Some argue that he is the Fourth Doctor and others that he is some future incarnation of the Doctor who chose to reuse an old, and popular, face. I, however, think there is another answer out there, that the Curator was not actually a version of the Doctor at all but rather his inspiration.

We’ll start by first looking at the other two possibilities first. The first possibility seems the most far-fetched. The obvious reason is that Tom Baker is noticeably older than his role in Who many years ago. While Time Crash worked to fix that with Five it doesn’t seem to work in this instance. The question begs itself, why it didn’t work on David Tennant? Clearly he was a bit older in Day than his reign as the Doctor before, but surely something like that wouldn’t have been ignored if they had an answer. So it doesn’t seem likely that this Curator is actually Four in disguise.

Then maybe he’s a future Doctor right? He does say something to the effect of: “In the coming years you may wish to revisit some old favorites.” Which can seem like an admission that he is a future incarnation but I’m not so sure. Every regeneration ends with the Doctor noticeably surprised by his new body. He’s never been able to control his regenerations before so are we expected to believe that in the future he suddenly learns how? The Night of the Doctor is largely about one singe instance where he has the opportunity to control what he becomes. Why would Moffat go to such effort to mark this as a special circumstance if he was just going to disregard that in the next episode?

Series 8 of Doctor Who continued filming on Monday evening in Cardiff at Mount Stuart Square. Peter Capaldi was on set filming a scene on horseback though the streets of a Victorian town. He wasn’t in his yet-to-be-revealed costume though, instead he was sporting Victorian pajamas.

Writer Phil Ford has publicly annouced his upcoming episode for Doctor Who Series 8. Ford co-wrote David Tennant’s episode ‘The Waters of Mars’ as well as many episodes of the Doctor Who spinoff The Sarah Jane Adventures and recently announced that he is writing the script for episode two of Peter Capaldi’s debut series.

Ford was quoted saying:

“I’m over the moon in a TARDIS! And I don’t know how I’ve managed to keep quiet about it for so long! It’s a huge honour to write for Doctor Who at any time, to be writing Peter Capaldi’s second adventure is that to infinity! I can’t wait to get on to set!”

Ford only gave three words describing the episode, “Behind enemy lines.”

Well its happened, the clock has struck twelve, Silence fell and the time of the Eleventh is over. The Time of the Doctor may not have been what all Doctor Who fans hoped for, but I feel it was fitting end to Matt Smith’s time as the renegade Time Lord. There were a lot of loose ends that needed to be tied up and Steven Moffat did it beautifully.

Going into the 2013 Christmas special, Steven Moffat had a lot to do, such as figuring out how the Doctor ended up on Trenzalore, why “silence will fall,” and how to get around those pesky regeneration restrictions. It’s like Moffat enjoys creating problems just so he can to solve them later. Some may think that Moffat created a simple solutions to all these questions but his method was actually quite clever, and it cleans the slate rather nicely for Peter Capaldi to step into the Doctor’s shoes.

***SPOILERS***

Here is a list of all the loose ends that were wrapped up in The Time of the Doctor:

The cracks in the Universe are the Time Lords trying to get out of the pocket universe and back into ours.

Madame Kovarian’s sect of the Papal Mainframe blew up the TARDIS to prevent The Doctor from ever reaching Trenzalore.

“Silence Will Fall” is the promise made by the non-Kovarian sect to not let the Doctor speak his name, as it would bring back the Time Lords and relaunch the Time War with the Daleks.

The Silence are priests of the Papal Mainframe, and are genetically designed to make confessors forget once they have confessed.

“Every year since I took over [Doctor Who] I’ve been trying to get the Zygons in and then I thought ‘Well, it’s the 50th…’

The Zygons are beautifully designed monsters, they are so wonderful… We barely changed the design at all because it was so good.”

He also added:

“Obviously the Daleks had to be there, the Daleks had to come to the party because they’re really scary and are part of the iconography of Doctor Who – possibly the central part – so we had to have them.

”And in a way it was fun to bring back Doctor Who’s biggest monster success ever, the Daleks, and then go to maybe the smallest monster success [the Zygons] – they were only in it once but everyone remembers them – great monsters, great outfits… and they have these nice whispery voices…”